The $750,000 Gawker Settlement That Could Distort Internet History

While the $31 million settlement reached between Gawker Media and Hulk Hogan (Terry Bollea) got most of the headlines this week, the bankrupt blogging enterprise also settled a smaller case that has sparked controversy over the history of the internet. Shiva Ayyadurai reached a reported $750,000 settlement against Gawker for a series of articles that sought to refute his claims to have invented email in 1979. Those stories have also been removed from Gawker’s sites, and Ayyadurai called the settlement “a victory for truth.”

But the case’s conclusion has been met with frustration by other pioneers, who say that it could muddle the history of one of the most important innovations of the digital revolution. While few seem to dispute that Ayyadurai developed a program called “EMAIL” in 1979 and copyrighted it in 1982, others had sent electronic messages as far back as the 1960s. Most historians consider Ray Tomlinson to have sent the first email proper over ARPANET in 1971. Tomlinson also implemented the use of the @ symbol in email addresses.

Speaking to Gizmodo, historians and developers worried that the settlement could weaken the legacy of figures like Tomlinson. Historian Katie Hafner said it was “appalling” that Ayyadurai “managed to make money off claims that appear to be misleading.”

For more on the Gawker cases, watch our video:

Though the settlement also entailed the removal of the articles investigating Ayyadurai, those articles had already been pulled by Univision, which now owns most of Gawker’s former network. That would seem to support widespread concern that the lawsuits against Gawker could have a chilling effect on media outlets. Archived versions of a few of the articles have been linked by Lawnewz.com.

Gawker Media Agrees to Settle Hulk Hogan Case For $31 Million

If you’re playing poker, you’d better hope your opponent isn’t being bankrolled by a billionaire with a long memory and almost infinite patience. That’s at least one potential lesson to be learned from Gawker Media’s long-running legal battle against former wrestler Hulk Hogan.

Gawker founder Nick Denton said Wednesday that his bankrupt company has agreed to settle the case. Court documents show that Gawker will pay Hogan $31 million.

That’s still a fairly huge sum, but it’s significantly less than the $140-million judgment that Hogan and his backer—Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel—won in a Florida jury trial after Gawker published a clip from a sex tape that Hogan said violated his privacy.

Gawker is also paying two other individuals who sued the company a total of $1.2 million. Shiva Ayyadurai sued Gawker for questioning his claim that he invented email, and freelance journalist Ashley Terrill sued because of a Gawker story that criticized her behavior in reporting on the dating app Tinder.

Stories related to all three cases will be removed from the Internet as part of the settlement.

All three of the lawsuits in question were being funded by Thiel, who said in an interview with the New York Times earlier this year that he was determined to bring Gawker down.

The billionaire got his wish when Gawker filed for bankruptcy protection in June, and held an auction of its assets. Univision, the Spanish-language broadcaster, acquired most of the company’s assets in August for $135 million, money that was placed in escrow while Gawker appealed the Hogan verdict.

A number of analysts believed that Gawker stood a good chance of having the Hogan judgment either reversed or significantly reduced, especially since two higher-court judges had already ruled in previous decisions that the publication of an excerpt of Hulk Hogan’s sex tape was newsworthy, and therefore covered by the protection of the First Amendment.

However, Denton said in a blog post that the prospect of having to spend significant amounts of money to appeal the decision was not a pleasant one, and that he chose to settle in order to put the affair behind him and achieve some kind of closure for Gawker staff.

An appeal “would have cost too much, and hurt too many people, and there was no end in sight,” the Gawker founder wrote. Thiel “had committed publicly to support Hulk Hogan beyond the appeal,” and showed no signs of ever giving up his pursuit of the company,” he said.

The most galling part of the settlement wasn’t the cash, but the agreement to remove the stories about Hogan and the other Thiel-backed plaintiffs, Denton said.

Peretti: We Want to Make Media for the Way the World Is Today

“As the most unpalatable part of the deal, three true stories — about Hulk Hogan, the claim by Shiva Ayyadurai that he invented email and the feud between the founders of Tinder — are being removed from the web.” The site where they were published, Gawker.com, was not acquired as part of the Univision deal.

Once the settlement is approved, the remainder of the $135 million that Univision paid will be released from escrow, and will go to Gawker’s creditors and investors, including as much as $10 million to Denton himself. A Russian-backed investment fund also put money into the company in January.

Some of the proceeds, Denton said, will also go to Gawker staff who gave up salary or bonuses in favor of getting shares in the now-bankrupt publisher. “This settlement will allow staff equity holders to recoup the salary or bonus they gave up,” he said in his post.

Denton also reiterated his desire to get out of publishing, but still continue to explore ways to bring people together online, because he is “convinced that the internet can bring people together in shared understanding rather than just triggering conflict between them.”

Peter Thiel Pledges $1.25 Million to Support Donald Trump

If savvy investment is all about timing, Peter Thiel may have lost his touch. The PayPal co-founder and billionaire venture capitalist has, according to the New York Times, chosen to give $1.25 million to the campaign of GOP candidate Donald Trump, at a moment when that campaign seems to have roughly the turnaround potential of Theranos.

The donations, a source close to Thiel told the Times, will be divided between a super PAC and direct contributions to the campaign.

On that front, Thiel’s donation presents a particular optical challenge for Palantir Technologies, which he co-founded and holds a major stake in. Palantir is currently battling a racial discrimination suit from the Department of Labor.

Thiel’s donation could have an impact on his many relationships in Silicon Valley. For instance, as TechCrunch points out, Thiel recently became an advisor to Y Combinator, whose founder, Paul Graham, is vocally anti-Trump. Thiel also sits on the board of Facebook, whose CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has publicly criticized Trump’s policy and rhetoric. Facebook took pains to distance itself from Thiel’s GOP convention speech.

For more on tech and politics, watch our video.

On Twitter, engineers and entrepreneurs are already being generous with their opinions.

Peter Thiel is donating $1.25M to Trump. If your startup took investment from him, I hope you're rethinking life.

Here’s How Much Gawker’s Nick Denton Will Be Paid to Not Work

Gawker Media founder Nick Denton is saying goodbye to his former company after broadcaster Univision agreed to acquire the publisher of popular websites such as Gizmodo and Jezebel for $135 million as part of a court-ordered bankruptcy auction.

Univision has agreed to hire 95% of the company’s former employees, but Denton isn’t among them.

However, the Gawker founder does get a consolation prize. According to the acquisition documents, he is to be paid $16,666 a month for the next two years as part of a non-compete clause.

The agreement, which Univision reportedly insisted on as part of the acquisition, says that Denton agrees not to “associate with any business enterprise” that is engaged in the same business as Gawker in either the U.S., Puerto Rico, or Hungary without first getting permission from Univision.

Although most of the content for Gawker Media’s websites was created in New York, where the company recently leased an office near Union Square, much of the web development and technical work behind the sites was done by a separate subsidiary based in Hungary. According to the Wall Street Journal, Denton was paid $500,000 a year by Gawker.

In a farewell letter he wrote to employees of Gawker, which he founded 14 years ago, Denton said that he was getting out of the “news and gossip business.” But he also said he was thinking about moving on to other projects that would involve making the web “a forum for the open exchange of ideas and information.”

Denton added that while the main Gawker.com website was shutting down, it might have a “second act” of some kind in the future, provided “the smoke clears and a new owner can be found.”

Gawker was forced into bankruptcy protection after former wrestler Hulk Hogan won a $140 million judgment against the company in a privacy-invasion lawsuit. Hogan launched the suit because Gawker published a clip from a sex tape that the wrestler recorded with a friend’s wife.

After the judgment was handed down, it was revealed that PayPalpypl founder and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel had financed the Hogan lawsuit, hoping to drive Gawker out of business for invading people’s privacy. He said he blamed the site for outing him as a gay man in 2007.

In addition to Gawker filing for bankruptcy, Denton also filed for personal bankruptcy because he and two other Gawker editors were named in the Hogan suit and are therefore required to help pay the damages. The Gawker founder listed a 30% stake in Gawker and a New York apartment as his only assets.

Gawker’s Nick Denton just challenged Peter Thiel to a debate. Watch:

The proceeds from the sale of Gawker to Univision will be placed in an escrow account while the company proceeds with an appeal of the Hogan decision. If Hogan wins, he will get the funds from the sale. But if the appeal is successful, Denton and Gawker’s other owners could get some of that money back.

Univision has agreed to buy most of the company’s websites, including Deadspin, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Jezebel, and Kotaku. But it didn’t want the main Gawker.com website because that site was associated with the Hogan lawsuit and a number of other unsavory stories.

Once the acquisition is finalized, the Gawker sites will become part of Univision’s Fusion Media Group, which includes the website Fusion—which Univision launched in 2013 in partnership with Disney—as well as the African-American culture site The Root and a stake in the humor site The Onion.

The bankruptcy court still has to approve the non-compete payments to Denton as part of the acquisition agreement, which is expected to close on September 9.

Here’s Gawker Founder Nick Denton’s Farewell Note

Gawker Media has been sold to Univision for $135 million in a court-ordered bankruptcy auction after the gossip site lost a $140 million judgment in a privacy-invasion case filed by former wrestler Hulk Hogan—a case that was financed by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.

You can read more about the background of the case here. In a statement to Gawker’s staff that was also released to the media, Gawker founder Nick Denton talked his exit from the “news and gossip business” and about what the site had achieved. The full text of the statement appears below:

I am relieved that, with the approval today of the agreement with Univision, that we have found the best possible harbor for Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Kotaku, Jalopnik, Jezebel and Deadspin, and our talented writers and other staff. They will be joining The Onion, ClickHole and other beloved web properties in Fusion Media Group, the digital operation of Univision. Isaac Lee and the team at Fusion are fellow spirits, as committed to real journalism and an open future as they are to digital media expansion.

Sadly, neither I nor Gawker.com, the buccaneering flagship of the group I built with my colleagues, are coming along for this next stage. Desirable though the other properties are, we have not been able to find a single media company or investor willing also to take on Gawker.com. The campaign being mounted against its editorial ethos and former writers has made it too risky. I can understand the caution.

Even if the appeals court overturns this spring’s Florida jury verdict, Peter Thiel has already achieved many of his objectives.

I will move on to other projects, working to make the web a forum for the open exchange of ideas and information, but out of the news and gossip business.

Gawker.com may, like Spy Magazine in its day, have a second act. For the moment, however, it will be mothballed, until the smoke clears and a new owner can be found. The archives will remain, but Monday’s posts will be the last of this iteration.

I am proud of what we have achieved at Gawker Media Group, both in our work and our business, never more so than in these last few months.

Our bloggers — and the alumni now dispersed through the media from the New Yorker to the New York Times — have introduced a new style of journalism, sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes snarky, but always authentic. We connect with a skeptical and media-savvy generation by giving them the real story, the version that journalists used to keep to themselves.

Without outside capital, we bootstrapped a profitable digital media operation. With only the talent and energy of our writers and other staff, we have drawn one of the most influential audiences in digital media: our stories connect with 100m people a month around the world. In 2016’s dance of media consolidation, the company has found a partner that understands our appeal and character; not all will have that luck.

As for Gawker.com, founded in 2003 and mothballed in 2016, it will live on in legend. As the short-lived killer android is told in Blade Runner: “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very very brightly.”

Why the Death of Gawker Isn’t Something to Cheer About

The court-ordered bankruptcy auction of Gawker Media approached its final conclusion on Thursday, with most of company’s assets set to be acquired by Univision for $135 million. But one thing that isn’t part of the deal is Gawker.com—the website that helped to launch an alternative blogging empire almost 14 years ago.

In other words, while some of Gawker will continue to live on as Univision absorbs existing verticals like Gizmodo and Jezebel, what many saw as the heart and soul of the company (to the extent it had either one of those things) will no longer exist. Staff were notified by founder Nick Denton on Thursday afternoon.

In the original offer from Ziff Davis that Gawker announced when it filed for bankruptcy, it looked as though a window had been left open that might have allowed Denton take over ownership of the main site, but that window appears to have closed. The Univision offer reportedly includes a clause that prevents him from competing with the new owner of his former company.

Univision hasn’t disclosed why it didn’t want to acquire Gawker.com, but it’s likely the reputation of the site (not to mention a conspicuous lack of advertising on that particular vertical) convinced the company not to include it in the deal.

In a statement (reproduced in full below), Denton said: “Sadly, neither I nor Gawker.com, the buccaneering flagship of the group I built with my colleagues, are coming along for this next stage. Desirable though the other properties are, we have not been able to find a single media company or investor willing also to take on Gawker.com. The campaign being mounted against its editorial ethos and former writers has made it too risky.”

For many, the name Gawker is now indelibly associated with a massive legal judgment for privacy invasion and a host of equally unseemly stories, including one that the site eventually took down that outed a married Conde Nast executive who was cruising for gay strippers.

The site also outed PayPalpypl co-founder and early Facebook fb investor Peter Thiel, of course, a slight that the Silicon Valley billionaire later said helped convince him to finance Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit in an ultimately successful attempt to drive the company into bankruptcy.

Gawker made a business out of shame porn, a decision that cost young journalists a paycheck. Welcome to the real world, kiddos.

While those kinds of stories are the ones many people will think of when they hear the name, however, Gawker also used its take-no-prisoners attitude to break some truly significant news stories, stories that in many cases were ultimately picked up by the mainstream media. It “spoke truth to power,” something that true crusading journalism theoretically always strives to do.

In many ways, Gawker is one of the premier examples of a media outlet that no one could ever truly love because of all the ways they humiliated people for no reason—and their penchant for cheap titillation. And yet, it accomplished too much serious journalism to truly hate.

Sure, Gawker wrote a lot of garbage but it was punctuated by world-changing and often doc-based scoops.

Denton, a refugee from the Financial Times who got rich selling one of the very first truly digital news entities (known as Moreover), often seemed cavalier about his approach to journalism. But he was committed to the cause of transparency and the belief that the world would be a better place if everyone could divulge all the secrets they knew about themselves or anyone else.

In typical Denton-like fashion, of course, that commitment didn’t always extend to the details of his own business affairs, which as Fortune‘s Jeff Roberts has reported involved numerous foreign entities and offshore holding companies designed to avoid tax.

As inscrutable and often infuriating as Denton could be, however, what he built with Gawker Media was arguably unique. He never tired of pointing out to anyone who would listen. Until the Hulk Hogan verdict, the company was one of the largest self-funded media entities in North America, with more than 100 million monthly unique visitors and annual revenues of $50 million.

The other thing I think was really important was Gawker’s fearlessness and transparency. We won’t see another news outlet like that again.

Along the way, Denton spent more money than almost any other media company, large or small, on trying to reinvent reader interaction through a proprietary platform he called Kinja, which he hoped would level the playing field between journalist and audience.

Perhaps, as many critics have argued, it was Denton’s own fault that his company was driven into the ground. Stories like the Hogan one had too much in them that was disturbing, and too little that justified their publication, something I think even Denton would admit.

still having trouble summoning much sympathy for Gawker when the lawsuit they lost was from them genuinely doing a terrible thing

And yet, there is such a shortage of independent, truth-telling media outlets at the moment that celebrating the death of another one seems hugely inappropriate.

Now, the empire that Denton built—which at least theoretically was once worth as much as $250 million—has been sold for a little over half that amount. And while most of the assets, human and otherwise, will survive, the core of what the company was is gone.

All of this because Gawker irritated a vindictive billionaire, and crossed the vague line between private and public information involving a celebrity—and, perhaps, because Denton was guilty of an excess of hubris.

Even though some of its stories made us deeply uncomfortable, however, and made it hard to defend the site to its critics, something important has been lost with the death of Gawker. The fact that one man was able to drive it out of business because of a personal vendetta should keep everyone in the media awake at night, regardless of what they think of the company or its legacy.

Denton’s farewell note to his employees and to Gawker readers appears in full below:

I am relieved that, with the approval today of the agreement with Univision, that we have found the best possible harbor for Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Kotaku, Jalopnik, Jezebel and Deadspin, and our talented writers and other staff. They will be joining The Onion, ClickHole and other beloved web properties in Fusion Media Group, the digital operation of Univision. Isaac Lee and the team at Fusion are fellow spirits, as committed to real journalism and an open future as they are to digital media expansion.

Sadly, neither I nor Gawker.com, the buccaneering flagship of the group I built with my colleagues, are coming along for this next stage. Desirable though the other properties are, we have not been able to find a single media company or investor willing also to take on Gawker.com. The campaign being mounted against its editorial ethos and former writers has made it too risky. I can understand the caution.

Even if the appeals court overturns this spring’s Florida jury verdict, Peter Thiel has already achieved many of his objectives.

I will move on to other projects, working to make the web a forum for the open exchange of ideas and information, but out of the news and gossip business.

Gawker.com may, like Spy Magazine in its day, have a second act. For the moment, however, it will be mothballed, until the smoke clears and a new owner can be found. The archives will remain, but Monday’s posts will be the last of this iteration.

I am proud of what we have achieved at Gawker Media Group, both in our work and our business, never more so than in these last few months.

Our bloggers — and the alumni now dispersed through the media from the New Yorker to the New York Times — have introduced a new style of journalism, sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes snarky, but always authentic. We connect with a skeptical and media-savvy generation by giving them the real story, the version that journalists used to keep to themselves.

Without outside capital, we bootstrapped a profitable digital media operation. With only the talent and energy of our writers and other staff, we have drawn one of the most influential audiences in digital media: our stories connect with 100m people a month around the world. In 2016’s dance of media consolidation, the company has found a partner that understands our appeal and character;
not all will have that luck.

As for Gawker.com, founded in 2003 and mothballed in 2016, it will live on in legend. As the short-lived killer android is told in Blade Runner: “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very very brightly.”

Univision Is Buying Bankrupt Gawker Media for $135 Million

Univision, the Spanish-language broadcaster that has been rapidly expanding online through acquisitions, has agreed to buy bankrupt publisher Gawker Media’s assets for approximately $135 million, the companies confirmed on Tuesday.

Gawker began a court-ordered auction of its business on Monday after losing a $140-million court case earlier this year involving former wrestler Hulk Hogan, who sued Gawker for invasion of privacy after it published a clip from a sex tape he made with a friend’s wife.

Although a number of media companies including Vox and Penske Media were said to be interested in bidding for Gawker, the auction only involved bids from Univision and Ziff-Davis.

The latter had an existing $90 million “stalking horse” deal to buy most of Gawker’s websites, which the two companies announced when Gawker initially filed for bankruptcy protection in June. But the company said that it ultimately didn’t want to pay as much as Univision did.

“Gawker Media Group has agreed this evening to sell our business and popular brands to Univision, one of America’s largest media companies,” Gawker founder Nick Denton said in an emailed statement. “I am pleased that our employees are protected and will continue their work under new ownership — disentangled from the legal campaign against the company.”

After Hogan launched his lawsuit against the company, it was revealed that PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel had been bankrolling the former wrestler and others who were suing Gawker, in the hope of driving the company out of business.

Thiel wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on Monday saying he was happy he had pushed the company into bankruptcy, but maintained that he is interested in protecting a free press so long as it doesn’t publish private information without permission.

Before the Hogan lawsuit, Gawker founder Nick Denton estimated the company’s market value at about $250 million. The company had revenue last year of about $50 million, according to bankruptcy documents. The money from the Univision sale will be held in escrow while Gawker appeals the original decision.

In an email to employees after the Univision deal was announced, Gawker Media president and general counsel Heather Dietrick said that she was “very happy that we’ve found the business a good home with a buyer who pushes the limits in its journalism and will allow us to continue the mission.”

Univision has been aggressively expanding beyond its Spanish-language roots for the past year or so, launching a news website called Fusion as well as acquiring web properties such as the African-American culture site The Root and the popular humor site The Onion.

Under the terms of the deal, Univision will acquire most of Gawker’s websites, including Jezebel, Gizmodo and other properties. However, the status of the main Gawker.com site—which originally published the Hogan video clip—remains unclear, according to a report at Gawker.

The Ziff Davis deal also included a $2.5 million breakup penalty if the deal was not completed, which is presumably included in the price Univision has agreed to pay.

Ziff Davis was also going to keep Denton on a consulting contract for two years, but a report in the Wall Street Journal says he will have no role with Univision after the sale. The company has agreed to pick up the existing Gawker Media union contract as well as the lease on its Manhattan office, which it just moved into earlier this year, according to Politico.

Billionaire Who Helped Bankrupt Gawker Says He Would Do It Again

As Gawker Media prepares for a court-ordered bankruptcy auction to sell off its assets to the highest bidder, the billionaire venture capitalist who helped drive the company under wrote in a New York Times opinion piece saying he is happy to have played a role in its failure—and he would happily do so again, if necessary.

Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who helped create the online payment company PayPalpypl and was also one of the earliest investors in Facebook fb, was revealed as the financial backer of former wrestler Hulk Hogan after Hogan won an unprecedented $140-million Florida court judgement against Gawker in March.

Unable to pay such a massive penalty—which amounts to almost three times its annual revenues—Gawker was forced to seek bankruptcy protection. The company is now engaged in an auction to sell the company’s assets, a process that began today with bids from multiple companies. (Here is a list of the most likely bidders).

In his New York Times essay, Thiel said that he was “proud to have contributed financial support” to Hogan’s case, which involved a video clip that Gawker published from a sex tape the wrestler made with a friend’s wife. Thiel went on to say that he will continue supporting Hogan, since Gawker has said it intends to appeal, and that he would “gladly support someone else in the same position.”

In fact, while the billionaire doesn’t mention it in his op-ed piece, he has also reportedly been involved in financing several other lawsuits against Gawker that haven’t gone to trial, some of which have even less legal merit than the Gawker case.

Although Thiel implies in his essay that the Gawker story about Hogan’s sex tape would not have been published by any right-thinking journalistic outlet, and that the First Amendment doesn’t and shouldn’t protect such behavior, two higher-court judges ruled before the Hogan decision that the Gawker piece was clearly covered by the Constitution’s free-speech protections.

In an interview with the Times in May, Thiel said that he funded Hogan’s lawsuit and others as part of a multi-year campaign to try and bankrupt the company. “It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,” he wrote. “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people, even when there was no connection with the public interest.”

Since his identity as Hogan’s backer was revealed, Thiel’s crusade against Gawker has been decried by a number of prominent journalists and defenders of a free press, who note that a billionaire bankrupting a media outlet as part of a personal vendetta raises serious questions about free speech.

You may hate Gawker, but if you cheer Thiel's successful vendetta you also don't care much for freedom of expression.

In his New York Times essay, however, Thiel argues that there is a line that media should not cross that involves publishing images or other information that could destroy someone’s privacy, when that information is not in the broader public interest. Thiel says he himself was a victim of the blurring of that line when Gawker outed him as a homosexual in 2007 without his permission.

The billionaire investor says a free press is “vital for public debate,” but that journalists must “exercise judgment” when it comes to invading a person’s privacy, and should condemn those who willfully cross it. “The press is too important to let its role be undermined by those who would search for clicks at the cost of the profession’s reputation,” Thiel writes.

Thiel, who also supports the idea of creating autonomous islands on which people could live and create their own laws, said he is in favor of a bi-partisan bill called the “Intimate Privacy Protection Act,” which would make it illegal to distribute explicit private images without a person’s consent, and would involve criminal penalties for those who profit from doing so.

Here Are the Most Likely Bidders in Gawker Media’s Bankruptcy Auction

After its dramatic loss to former wrestler Hulk Hogan in a landmark privacy trial, New York-based publisher Gawker Media is being auctioned off to the highest bidder this week in order to try and pay the $140-million penalty in the case. All bids are due by the end of business Eastern Time on Monday.

Dozens of publishing companies and other media-industry players have expressed interest in potentially making an acquisition offer for the company over the past few months, according to sources with knowledge of the auction. But in many cases, these are competitors who are just looking for more information about Gawker’s revenues and so on, and aren’t seriously thinking about acquiring the company.

At the top of the list of companies who are expected to make a bid is long-time magazine publisher Ziff Davis, which has already signed an offer to buy the company for $90 million.

That deal was announced at the same time Gawker filed for court protection. Bankruptcy auctions typically involve such a “stalking horse bid,” which is used to set a floor for potential acquisition offers. But other bidders could come in with higher offers.

Gawker founder Nick Denton is said to favor the Ziff Davis bid—in part because the deal involves him staying on as a consultant to the company. The deal also leaves the door open to Denton potentially buying back the main Gawker website, while Ziff Davis takes the other sites such as Gizmodo and Jezebel.

Two other leading bidders for Gawker are Vox Media, which runs the Vox site as well as other sites such as Recode, SB Nation, and Penske Media—which owns Variety magazine. Vox landed $200 million in funding from NBCUniversal last year. Penske has also shown an interest in expansion after acquiring a group of publications, including Women’s Wear Daily in 2014 for $100 million.

There’s also the possibility that Vox and Penske could combine to make a bid for Gawker, according to the New York Post, with some of the assets being split between them. One potential sticking point for some bidders is the 15-year lease Gawker signed in 2014 for its new office space, which is worth $75 million.

Another leading contender for Gawker’s assets is Univision, a media company that started as a Spanish-language broadcaster and has since expanded onto the web, by starting a site called Fusion and acquiring other digital publishers, including the African-American culture site The Root and the humor site The Onion. Univision was reportedly interested in Gawker even before the Hogan lawsuit.

Also on the bidding list are some less-likely acquirers, including New York magazine, which the New York Timessays might be interested in buying some or all of Gawker.

The magazine is backed by the family trust of former Wall Street financier Bruce Wasserstein, which could probably afford such a deal. But sources close to the auction process say the magazine is not likely to be a contender in the contest for Gawker’s assets.

Some believe there’s a possibility that eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar might make a dark-horse bid. Omidyar pledged in 2013 to spend $250 million to create an alternative media company, and the company that emerged from that commitment—known as First Look Media—has reportedly discussed potential partnerships and/or funding with Gawker in the past.

First Look Media’s ambitions have changed since it was originally founded, however. The company’s initial vision was to create a stable of magazine-style properties focused on different topics, which would have theoretically been a good fit with Gawker. But since then, the company has shut down a couple of its projects, and is said to be focusing on video, which makes a bid for Gawker seem unlikely.

Speaking of long shots, could billionaire Peter Thiel—who funded the Hogan lawsuit in an attempt to drive Gawker out of business—put in a bid for the company and then shut it down?

Theoretically such an offer is possible, as Recode explained in a recent post. But because the purpose of a bankruptcy auction is to find the “highest and best” acquirer for a company’s assets, a bid from the man who wanted to extinguish Gawker as a business probably isn’t going to be the one that fits that criteria.

And what happens after the auction? The new owner takes possession of the assets, and the amount they paid goes into an escrow account to await the final decision in the Hogan case, which Gawker appealed. It has been on hold since the company filed for bankruptcy.

If Gawker loses, then all the proceeds from the sale go to Hogan. But if Gawker wins a reduced judgement, some of it may go to Denton and the other Gawker investors, including a venture fund that put money in earlier this year.

Gawker Says Goodbye With Emotion and Defiance

Gawker Media threw itself a farewell party Wednesday night in New York City, and the tone was about what you would expect from a company that regularly crossed ethical lines while pursuing aggressive but influential journalism.

The company is known for a scrappy family of websites—including Gawker, Gizmodo, Valleywag, and Deadspin—but also for a muckraking reporting style that produced a barrage of lawsuits, including one that resulted in a $140 million verdict in favor of former wrestler Hulk Hogan.

Gawker Media is currently in bankruptcy and its assets, including the websites, will be sold at auction next week. The restructuring will allow the sites to continue operating safe from the legal hammer of Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who, it emerged, has secretly been bankrolling some of the lawsuits, including the one filed by Hogan.

If Gawker and its founder, Nick Denton, had any regrets about the company’s style of journalism, they didn’t express it Wednesday night.

Instead, Denton praised his staff and writers and the “say anything” culture of blogging Gawker helped to define. Clutching a glass of red wine and looking weary, Denton also warned about the growing power of Facebook over journalism, and threats to media outlets in the U.S. and around the world.

The Oxford-educated Gawker founder, who once worked as a financial journalist, also praised writers Sam Biddle and A.J. Daulerio, who are the target of ongoing lawsuits and will not benefit from the shield of the company’s bankruptcy. (The praise for Daulerio was perhaps generous in light of the writer’s ill-advised comments during the Hogan trial that likely led the jury to increase the verdict amount.)

Gawker editor John Cook was more direct and defiant. He cussed out “wealthy billionaires” like Thiel and media moguls, including Roger Ailes, who is leaving Fox News with a $40 million severance package despite a spate of sexual misconduct allegations.

Cook also praised the company’s writers, including the women who write for Gawker’s Jezebel site for withstanding “vicious campaigns” of online hate and harassment. And in a curious analogy, Cook likened the “sacrifice” made by Gawker writers to that of the Khans—the Gold Star parents who spoke at the DNC—though he qualified the remark by saying the writers’ sacrifice was not on the same level.

The audience of about 200 people lapped it up. Composed of mostly millennial former Gawker staffers, the crowd roared approval at Cook’s comments, and also gave a long and loud ovation to Denton.

Perhaps fittingly, no one acknowledged any moral or journalistic shortcomings on the part of Gawker Media, or second-guessed any of its most controversial decisions, including one last year to publish a universally condemned piece (since taken down) about a gay escort who attempted to blackmail a little-known media executive.

The party was a decidedly low-budget affair with warm wine and a few boxes of pizza that quickly ran out. It took place despite a court motion by Gawker’s creditors that objected to a $1,000 expense for the farewell—an objection rejected by the bankruptcy judge, who archly noted the legal proceedings challenging the party cost as much as the festivity itself.

Bids for Gawker’s assets must be filed by Monday. The leading candidate is currently media firm Ziff Davis, though others are expected to file too. The results of the auction should be known by next week.